I should like to say a word or two from the 'Clapham Omnibus', on which the average man is said to ride, about Clive Sinclair and the QL.
First, everything that has been said against his customer relations department is true. It seems to be run by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
However, when people criticise Sir Clive's products, particularly the QL, they seem to forget that he has arguably done the most to enable ordinary, untechnical people like me to compute and to enjoy computing. He was the first to realise that the average user would enjoy his initiation into computing if he could: a) afford to buy a machine without a second mortgage; b) get commands onto the screen with simple key-presses rather than laborious typing; c) read the finished product easily without having to rememeber to put in spaces and d) edit program lines quickly and easily. Without these featuers I am certain I should have given up computing at an early stage. My generation suffers from a nervous reaction to the electronic age which has, unfortunately, tended to persist.
This is why I applaud the QL. Of course it hasn't got "proper" windows. Of course the Microdrive isn't a serious business proposition. And he definitely shouldn't have advertised it before it was ready.
Surely the point is that Sinclair is the only computer manufacturer to have taken the risks necessary to produce a computer with a mature, exciting and imaginative language on board, for serious programs as standard, 200K of mass storage, a flexible and advanced chip and enormous memory capacity for a sum which I and thousands like me - ordinary, untechnical, 1940s vintage willing amateur - can just afford. The messy bits, the dodginess of the Microdrive, the slowness of the SuperBasic, the "Is it really a 32-bit machine?" questions are, in my humble opinion, irrelevant to the sort of people who will buy the QL.
If I could run to an all-singing-all-dancing IBM PC with twin floppies and a modem I should no doubt join the chorus of haughty detractors massing around the QL. However, with only limited funds at my disposal, I am more than happy to trade reliability and up-market extras for the QL's affordability.
22nd September 1984
